OPAL Objectives

The “European Open Educational Quality Initiative” helps to boost the use and acceptance of OER in Europe and beyond, by establishing a European quality environment for individuals, organisations and policy makers, helping them to define, identify and develop quality for OER. In particular the project will work towards building a quality consensus between various stakeholders and networks through dialogue and involving them into interaction about how OER should be supporting innovation and quality. The project supports the following objectives:

• Promote a new vision for quality of OER as levers for innovation of learning experiences embedded into long-term educational objectives and integrated in lifelong learning strategies.


• Foster the uptake of OER in education and training systems through provision of a quality infrastructure (a quality handbook, awards and a quality clearinghouse).


• Support educational actors to use OER by identifying high quality resources and methodologies for defining, identifying and developing quality.


• Link and connecting learning communities in the field of OER in order to form a European consultative group for quality of OER and building a partnerships for quality consensus


• Analyse and consolidate evidence on the added-value and impact of OER, with particular attention to institutional as well as pedagogical innovation and change.


• Develop easy to use tools and make them available as innovative practices or services, and will have a multiplier effect and result in greater knowledge about the use of OER.


• Identifying and study innovative uses of OER in order to derive quality practices from the actual successful use and innovative integration of OER in educational scenarios. It will not limit its scope to but will pay special attention to OER for groups at risk of exclusion.

OPAL Workplan

The project will support the mainstreaming of OEP, and will:

1. study and map quality approaches and methods for quality and link them to OEP in order to provide validated Guidelines for Quality and Innovation through OEP in HE and AE,
2. launch the Consultative Group for Quality and Innovation through OEP in order to concert existing initiatives, form a multistakeholder validation environment, and liaise with existing international networks in order to contribute a chapter on quality and innovation to them,
3. set up the Open Educational Quality Clearing house in which peer-reviewed OER and OEP will be linked and which will serve as a Register for organisations which want to join the European Charter for Quality and Innovation through OEP, and
4. develop a Awards for Innovation and Quality through OEP in HE and AE